Archive for the ‘Edd Vick’ Category
Guy Walks Out of a Bar
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
After work Guy and I stop into the Long Island Barrel Bar as usual. I have my beer and Guy his whiskey, but after downing it he says, “Well, goodbye to you, Peter. You’ve been better than most.”
I jump to several conclusions, and say, “You’ve been fired? You’re leaving town? You’re dying?” Then one last conclusion. “You’re not getting set to kill yourself?”
“None of the above.” He signals Morty for another whiskey. “I’m just off to search for Bella.”
“Bella?” There had been an Annabelle back in high school. What was her last name? “Do you mean Annabelle Phipps?”
He lights up. “I’m close,” he says to himself. “Yes,” he continues aloud. “Bella and I, we got married right out of school.”
“You did not.” I know better; he’s as single as I am.
“Oh, I did,” he says. “I married Bella and moved to Philly. Then we came back to the city to see her parents, and I stopped in here, to the Barrel, because I’d always been too young to drink before.” He sips at his second whiskey.
Guy has been coming to this bar with me for years, almost every night.
“I had one drink, then walked out of the bar,” he says. “And the world was different. There had never been a Bella; her family had never even emigrated. And I had moved to Staten Island after school to work as a nurse.” He shakes his head, stares at the TV screen for a few seconds. “I stayed in that world for a month before I worked it out. I came back to this bar, the only thing that looked exactly the same, had one single drink, and walked out.”
“Things changed?”
“And how. The local football team was called the New England Plymouths. Nobody used neon. And still no Bella. I couldn’t trace her family at all, or mine.” He plunked his empty glass down. “So I came back here, and I’ve kept coming back. In some worlds I didn’t exist, in some the money was so different I had to find a job for a week before I could come in and pay for a drink. Some worlds they didn’t even speak English. Those were tough.”
He’s spinning a tall one, or more drunk than I realized. “Maybe we should call it a night,” I say. “I’ll cover that last drink.”
“Right. Well, this is goodbye.” And he shakes my hand.
When I walk out ten minutes later he’s there. “Hello?” he says, wary expression on his face. “Peter, is it?”
“You know it is. We were just in there together.”
“Oh god,” he says. “Did I have one drink? Or two?”
Higher Fidelity
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
Benedikt Tarr picked up the used CD at a garage sale. It was an act of desperation prompted by his seeing it had been released in 1984, quite likely seriously out of print. The morning’s pickings had been nonexistent so far, and for someone who made a living on eBay that was tantamount to disaster. He repressed the urge to try talking the seller down from fifty cents.
On his way home he popped the CD in the car’s player, to make sure it was as pristine as it looked and so he could, “in truth”, declare that it had been played only once. The strains of Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto Number Four bloomed from his speakers. At a stoplight he looked over the case carefully, finding it free of scratches. The thin insert showed a white-haired man in profile at a piano, behind him a full orchestra in tuxedos except for a woman in an evening gown sitting at a harp.
Someone coughed. Then someone walked by, from the left speaker to the right. Both sounds were faint, but audible. Benedikt turned his head so he could hear better, eyes still on the road. Just when he thought he’d imagined them, someone’s chair creaked a bit and someone else sniffed. “Crap,” said Benedikt. He’d read about this problem with early CDs; nobody expected them to pick up so much more than the music.
Four minutes, fifty seconds in, he heard the music from a new angle, one too heavy on the woodwinds.
Shaking his head at the slipshod production, he gripped the wheel and vowed to research the better CD labels. Then the audio changed; it sounded like he was in the timpani section. Again, and he was in strings. Then he seemed to be in all three places at once, then more.
Vision came next, of a score, the back of a flautist’s head, nimble fingers on a violin’s neck.
Smells: sweat, dust, and polished wood.
Fingers shifting up and down on cello strings.
Fingers impacting on piano keys.
Fingers strumming the harp.
Benedikt’s brain splintered into a hundred tracks. He heard felt saw the concerto from the inside, sitting in each seat and playing each instrument.
Then his car ran into a tree at thirty-eight miles per hour.
*
Benedikt Tarr skidded down the aisle and slammed into the side of the stage. He lay there for a time, then ran his hands down his chest. He appeared to be in one piece. He looked around. No car. He was in a theatre. Finally, he stood, and saw the orchestra conductor, then the orchestra. They all stared back at him. “Tell me,” the conductor finally said. “Do you play French horn?”